Lights, Camera, Action ... and other Observations

The three weeks are up! It's been a fantastic time. Here are a few more observations I've made from walking around Shanghai ...

1. Lights! Bright & light colors! The advertisements and lighting here is very often light or neon, and tends to be very bright. It's almost ... too happy (and reminds me of George Carlin's commentary on being "more than happy").

2. Shanghai is a lot like New York city in that it has buildings/places that range in age, function and form, crammed together. Just walking a few minutes from the hotel in any direction, you can find: a gymnastics center on top of a massive grocery store; a construction site next to old high-rise buildings; skyscrapers, subway transportation and touristy areas; local and American food, along with street food vendors using rusty portable BBQs; signs in both English and Mandarin symbols ... just to name a few. It's an incredibly complex place, and at the same time, enormous. It's a mix of buildings, cultures and styles in every direction, as far as you can see, seemingly no matter where you are.

3. Shanghai is an industrial city, and according to our Chinese colleagues, is much dirtier than other cities in China. I've heard/read it may be one of the dirtiest urban centers in the world. I have no idea if that's true, but it's worth mentioning because in our collective experiences, it's very dirty/unpolished here (I haven't had a single person disagree with that assessment, and some would take the statement much further I think). With few exceptions, even the nicest places - clubs, restaurants, tourist attractions - that we've been to had some aspect that was oddly unkempt or unclean. Many of the older places would definitely be uninhabitable in the U.S., and some structures are just falling apart. The air is thick - a combination of humidity and smog that caused some people to have respiratory problems, especially when working out - and the sun rarely shines through the clouds, even though it hasn't rained much.

4. This brings up another point ... there is a HUGE economic and social divide in this city, and you can see it. Whether it's simply walking the street, enjoying the clubs, restaurants, clothing shops, or visiting neighborhoods ... it's very obvious that you either live well (or extremely well), or you live poorly (or barely survive). I don't like to generalize, but in all our collective experiences and based on discussions with our Chinese colleagues, this appears to be very accurate. It's really sad.

Walking to the mall, I walk through a busy shopping center; pass a homeless person sleeping and a few old street vendors; proceed past a modern-looking hospital and your usual shops (ie. China Mobile); followed by an abandoned building and some poor housing, which is across the street from some modern skyscrapers; stroll by a large, abandoned, walled-off park ... to a station for a bullet train that runs faster than any we have in the entire U.S.; and finally, walk into the mall.

5. "Better City, Better Life" is the slogan for the forced shutdown and reconstruction in areas of Shanghai to prepare it for the 2010 World Expo. I can't help but recall Nineteen Eighty-Four when I read that slogan.

6. I walked into the Cloud Nine Mall, which is a 10-minute walk from the hotel, on the second day of the trip. I have never seen anything like it: 12 stories of escalators (10 high, 2 basement), in a fish-bowl structure designed almost like the Guggenheim. I couldn't even get all the floors in a picture because the angle was so vertically acute.

Speaking of the mall, there were a ton of designer clothes shops, but what really caught my eyes were the models. They were hot ... no, just kidding. What caught my attention was that you rarely saw anyone of Asian descent. It was all whites (no blacks unfortunately), and the styles of the outfits themselves were also very American.

7. At a local park, street vendors were selling birds in tiny cages.

8. Vendors in the markets are very persistent. They'll chase after you, pull at you and even yell at you (in Chinese or English). They're not the only persistent ones too ... in areas where people clearly have money - tourist attractions, restaurants and bars/clubs - you tend to find flocks of beggars. I've had beggars - whose guess-timated ages range from 5 to 70 - pull my clothes, pinch me, force things in my face, hit me, push me ... anything to violate my personal space and get my attention. For the most part, if you show any sign of paying attention, you'd better start running, because that person is going to follow you for blocks.

9. Bikes. Lot's and lot's of bikes on the roads.

10. Here are my favorite places during my stay:
- 2 different all you can eat, all you can drink Japanese food restaurants ... for $20 per person. One of these places forced you to cook your own food on a mini stove, which was very fun.
- A traditional hot stove restaurant. A piping hot urn is placed in the middle of the table, and surrounded with water that immediately boils from the heat. You're then served spices, sauces and raw meats and vegetables, family style. You drop your food into the heated water, in a ladle. While it cooks, you make your own sauce and spices to dip your cooking food in, and when you're ready, it's time to eat!
- Bar Rouge, a bar that has an outdoor view to the river and all of downtown Shanghai.
- Babyface, a hilarious/crazy bar.
- Windows, a Sports bar in a basement ... with no windows.
- The Piano Bar/KTV we found across from another favorite M2.
- KTV franchises in general
- Yu Gardens & the World Financial Tower